Have no clue on how to take a live snapshot of your droplet in DigitalOcean? We can help you with it.

Many times Droplet owners cannot afford downtime for taking backup.

DigitalOcean snapshot creates on-demand disk images of droplets and volumes saved to account.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests to take snapshots of DigitalOcean droplets as a part of our DigitalOcean Management services.

Today, let’s discuss how our Support Engineers take a live snapshot of the droplet for our customers.

What are these snapshots?

DigitalOcean Snapshots are simply backups taken at a particular time. Usually, these on-demand disk images of droplets and volumes get saved to account.

It provides a full copy of droplets or volumes. Taking the snapshot of a droplet saves everything from the Droplet to a disk image saved in the DigitalOcean account. In other words, it exactly matches the settings of the Droplet at the time of snapshot creation.

Moreover, we can access the snapshots for droplets and block storage volumes across all the regions. They remain in the account unless removed manually.

Why use DigitalOcean Live snapshot?

In DigitalOcean we can take snapshots in two ways. That is, either by turning off the server or a live snapshot.

In the former one, we turn off the server for data consistency. This is the highly recommended option in the case of servers with frequent database changes.

But, in the latter one, we won’t turn off the server. Instead, we take the snap of the running server. This is suggested only in some production servers which can’t be turned off.

However, taking snapshots of droplets having a high amount of data will take some time. And, shutting down the server for that much time is not a good option.

Taking live snapshots is also secure and there will be no loss of data.

How do we take a live snapshot?

We usually take the snapshots to create a new droplet from it or while changing the droplet to a new region.

Changing region means, migrating the droplet to a new data center. So, before migrating we take the snapshot and create a new droplet from it in the new region.

Recently, one of our customers having servers hosted in DigitalOcean came with a request. He mentioned that his servers needs to be migrated to new region. In this case, the customer was very specific about server downtimes. He did not want the users affected by the region change process.

So our Dedicated Engineers did the following.

Firstly, we took the live snapshot of the droplet as the customer asked not to turn off his server.

For taking the live snapshot we selected the live snapshot option in DigitalOcean >> Droplets>> Search the droplet to be snapped >> Take live snapshot.

After completing this process we created a new droplet in new region from this snapshot.

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Conclusion

In short, we discussed in detail on snapshots in DigitalOcean and saw how our Support Engineers helps in taking the live snapshots of droplets in DigitalOcean.